The 32-year-old, who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, loves his daily fix of My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic, and he’s not alone. He’s part of a growing group of “bronies” (“bro ponies”) — men who are fans of a TV show largely intended for a much younger audience.

“First we can’t believe this show is so good, then we can’t believe we’ve become fans for life, then we can’t believe we’re walking down the pink aisle at Toys R Us or asking for the girl’s toy in our Happy Meal,” Allen said in an e-mail to Wired.com. “Then we can’t believe our friends haven’t seen it yet, then we can’t believe they’re becoming bronies too.”

Every nerd has a favorite TV show they watch religiously and know inside and out. But My Little Pony seems like an unlikely object of fanboy love. Since the show debuted last fall on cable channel Hub TV, it’s attracted a growing number of male fanatics. Their love of the show is internet neo-sincerity at its best: In addition to watching the show, these teenage, twenty- and thirtysomething guys are creating pony art, posting fan videos on YouTube and feeding threads on 4chan (and their own chan, Ponychan).

“I believe the fan base for this new generation of MLP is one of the most amazing/unexpected things to come out of the internet in a long while,” Henri Yount, a 20-year-old from Virginia whose My Little Pony mashups with movie trailers have gotten nearly 350,000 views on YouTube, said in an e-mail to Wired.com (see his pony-riffic spin on Watchmen above).

“When I say ‘amazing,’ I’m referring to the crazy amount of content and the hard-working people who produce material every day, which I haven’t seen in many other fan bases,” Yount added.

YouTube isn’t the only place online creative communities are gathering in pony love. The online artist collective deviantArt had, at last count, nearly 90,000 pieces of My Little Pony artwork and hundreds more aregoing upeach day (on one random day in May, about 330 pieces were submitted).

My Little Pony creations have taken off in other areas as well. On Equestria Daily, a fan blog that on first blush could be mistaken for a fifth-grade girl’s locker door, site curator Shaun (he asked that his last name be withheld) struggled to find a half-dozen pieces of art to post in a given day back in January. He now claims he can easily fill a post with 30 images.

Shaun isn’t just impressed with the amount of new content bronies are submitting to his site, he’s also amazed by his own fascination with the show.

“Honestly, if someone were to have told me I’d be writing a pony blog seven months ago, I would have called them insane,” the 23-year-old from Arizona said in an e-mail to Wired.com.

Equestria Daily started back in January as a fun place to collect fanfic and news about the show, Shaun said, but “it has, obviously, evolved way past that.” The brony hub gets roughly 175,000 pageviews per day now, up from about 20,000 just a few months ago, he said.

‘Honestly, if someone were to have told me I’d be writing a pony blog seven months ago, I would have called them insane.’

Most people over the age of, say, 20 remember My Little Pony as a saccharine-smelling Hasbro toy and cartoon from the 1980s. In the decades since the release of the first line of ponies in 1982, there have been a number of dolls, TV shows and direct-to-DVD releases related to the My Little Pony name. Yet, save for a pop cultural archivist here and there (or perhaps a raver), very few of those variations have found an audience beyond the age-3-and-up children for whom My Little Pony is intended.

So, why the breathless adoration? Some fans say the show’s appeal lies in good illustration, excellent characters or, as Allen put it, a “perfect storm of ’80s nostalgia and cultural irony.” But nearly every fan Wired.com contacted can be far more specific about the source of the show’s genius: Lauren Faust.

Faust, a 36-year-old who manned the latest reboot of the My Little Pony franchise for Hub TV at the request of Hasbro Studios, has a bit of a history handling shows with crossover appeal. Prior to her tenure on My Little Pony, Faust was a writer and storyboard artist on The Powerpuff Girls, another show that had appeal way beyond its intended demographic.

While Faust acknowledges that her work on The Powerpuff Girls influenced her creative process and that she intentionally looked to create a show that could be enjoyed by adults, she said she’s genuinely surprised about the large number of dedicated bronies, whom she clearly adores.

Lauren Faust Image courtesy Hub TV

“This might be a little short-sighted on my part, but I just assumed that any adult man who didn’t have a little girl wouldn’t even give it a try,” Faust said in a phone interview. “The fact that they did and that they were open-minded and cool enough and secure in their masculinity enough to embrace it and love it and go online and talk about how much they love it — I’m kind of proud.”

Faust brings up a good point. Aside from a few brony-haters, blessedly very little (negative) hay seems to get made over dudes liking something that’s “supposed to be for girls” (like, for example, the way girls would be side-eyed for liking Transformers in years past).

Despite a tacit understanding that some people might be surprised by their choice of entertainment, most bronies show little to no compunction about their fandom. They shouldn’t have to. And, intentionally or not, they might be bucking the gender socialization of things considered to be “for girls” or “for boys.”

For at least one man who worked on My Little Pony with Faust, enjoyment of the show isn’t a matter of boys versus girls — it’s about appreciating good stories.

“I had a Google Alert for the show and I kept getting alerts to comments that people were making that were like, ‘I’m a guy and I’m 22 and I love this, why do I love this!?'” said Jayson Thiessen, the show’s supervising director. “I did see what they liked about it because I liked it.”

And the Hub is making more overt attempts to embrace the brony audience. In an extended promo video for the show released recently — a take on Katy Perry’s “California Gurls” called “Equestria Girls” — the ponies lead by Pinkie Pie sing the praises of “our bronies.”

Embracing the brony audience could be a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow for Hasbro because, as Shaun notes, some bronies would like better merch, adding “the current toys are good for the originally intended target audience of 7-year-old girls … but Lauren Faust and the team behind the actual cartoon did an amazing job of accidentally targeting us instead.”

Faust, however, left the show after the first season aired its final episode early last month. Discussing her departure on her deviantArt journal, she said of her colleagues: “Together I think we helped prove that ‘for girls’ does not have to automatically equal ‘lame.'” She also thanked “the kids, the parents and all you bronies” for supporting the show, adding: “The array of people this show has touched has completely exceeded my wildest expectations!”

‘I learned more about theory of mind, friendships and social interactions from this season than I had in the previous 31 years of life.’

If that sounds like hyperbole, it’s not.

“This weird alchemy that Lauren Faust tapped into when she set out to make the show accessible to kids and their parents hooks into the male geek’s reptilian hindbrain and removes a lifetime’s behavioral indoctrination against pink,” said New Mexico brony Allen. “As a person with Asperger syndrome, I learned more about theory of mind, friendships and social interactions from this season than I had in the previous 31 years of life.”

So, what’s a brony to do while he waits for the show to return next fall? It’s possible that several months without new episodes to power the pony posse will cause the buzz to die down. It seems far more likely, though, that the show’s absence will only make the bronies’ hearts grow fonder.

“Season 1 is over,” said Shaun from Equestria Daily, “and I honestly expected everything to die down a bit (mainly so I could finally get a break!), but it seems like the fans are more ravenous than ever for more content.”

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